Indigo (For The Love of Purple #1) - Audrey Faye Page 0,2

way that often happens to Violet and rarely messes with me or Blue.

That’s a good thing. We wouldn’t handle it well.

I shrug off the moment of uneasiness. Traveling is full of surprises, and I roll with most of them just fine. I make another mental note about where the bakery lives in relation to my car and keep walking. My feet tug me across the street, a small effort nicely rewarded with hints of the buildings just around the bend and a peekaboo view of the ocean.

I pause a moment to look out at the bay and the mist curling up off of its mirror-calm waters and sigh happily. There’s something to be said for leaving the city occasionally.

My feet tug me onward.

The street follows the curve of the bay and so do my feet.

Until they stop dead and send an impossible message to my eyes.

I stare, gobsmacked, at the building I never thought I’d see in real life. It’s a simple two-story storefront, less quaint than most of the others in this town and painted a color that my stuttering brain puts somewhere between indigo and blue. It’s got a door with a mural that makes me dizzy, and a hand-painted sign, slightly off kilter, hanging above the center window.

Hands shaking, I pull out my phone and tap into a very specific photo album. I scroll through the two dozen photos it contains. The first is of a quick crayon sketch, done when we were eight. The most recent is a page from Violet’s sketchpad, drawn just last month. I look at them all, one at a time. Then I hold up my phone, my fingers still unsteady, and take a picture.

I send it, along with the text that’s going to upend all three of our lives.

I found it.

Chapter Two

DREW

She’s here.

I can feel it, and that’s entirely unexpected, because my quirky paranormal abilities rarely bother themselves with the living. But she’s no ghost. Even from this far away, I can feel the energy that lives inside of her. The passion.

Mabel cackles behind me. “Ghosts can be plenty passionate, Andrew Bartholomew.”

I roll my eyes and set my brushes into water. That will hold them for a few hours, as long as I remember to come back to them. I’ve never been an artist who’s very good at cleaning up his messes. “Stay out of my head.”

She sniffs. “Stop leaking.”

Ghosts don’t respect many boundaries, but I don’t think Mabel respected many back when she was alive, either. Which is a good thing, or a six-year-old kid lost in the foster-care system might not have grown up into a guy whose worst sin is abusing his art supplies. But there are still days that having a ghost butt into your thoughts can be annoying, especially when you’re a grown man and she’s not always convinced of that.

A faint whiff of air brushes the back of my neck. The closest Mabel can get to touch. “She’s here, beautiful boy.”

She’s always called me that. Right from the day she decided I needed a mother, and since there weren’t a lot of decent choices available, one who died a couple hundred years ago would just have to do.

I reach out with a wisp of the fond gratitude that lives in every cell of me. She’s earned it, even if she is a nosy and possibly matchmaking busybody. “What did you do?”

She sniffs again, from further away this time. She’s always been a temperamental ghost. “Is that really what that matters right now?”

I manage not to roll my eyes. “Remember the conversations we keep having about consent? I know they haven’t updated the ghost handbook lately, but in this era, it’s considered good manners to let living people make their own choices.”

“Because you do such a fine job of it.” The vinegar in her voice is just one of the many reasons I love her. “You’re almost forty-five years old, and what do you have to show for it?”

A career many envy, a level of contentment a six-year-old boy never could have dreamed of, and a mother who loves me dearly, even if she’s a little unconventional.

Air brushes against the back of my neck again. “You’ve been waiting for her, and she’s come. I had nothing to do with this, I promise you. I wouldn’t bruise your heart so.”

She would for the right reasons. Mabel has never been soft. But she also doesn’t make promises lightly. Which means it’s time to deal with the strange knowing